February 12, 2006

The Stuff (1985): B

The Stuff is arguably writer/director Larry Cohen’s most disappointing work, not because it’s terrible but, rather, because its execution never lives up to its scrumptious satiric premise. Corporate saboteur Mo Rutherford (Michael Moriarty, in another entertainingly odd, mumble-mouthed performance) is hired by ice cream industry interests to discover the secret behind desert sensation The Stuff, a mysterious diet product that’s taken the country by storm but, it seems, has some strange side effects. During his quest to uncover the carefully guarded (subterranean) origins of the yogurt-y product, Rutherford teams up with karate-chopping disenfranchised Stuff competitor Chocolate Chip Charlie (SNL vet Garrett Morris), an advertising exec (Andrea Marcovicci) and a boy (Scott Bloom) who, in attempting to evade his Stuff-possessed family, learns that “everybody has to eat shaving cream once in a while.” A plot ripe with potential for skewering ‘80s-era consumerism, Cohen wastes an inordinate amount of time on tepid chase sequences, head-bashing effects, a brutally unfunny right-wing militant nut (Paul Sorvino), and exposition less engaging than an FDA-approved ingredients label. But if The Stuff – riffing on The Blob and Invasion of the Body Snatchers – amounts to little more than an amusing but unfulfilling lampoon of capitalist consumption, it at least deserves credit for the brilliantly random pairing, in a Stuff commercial, of Abe Vigoda and “Where’s the Beef?” icon Clara Peller.